Voice mail has become an important part of communication. As communication systems have become more integrated over time and service providers offer packages of telephone, data and video services, users of such services have a growing expectation that they will be able to access their voice mail in a variety of ways.
Providing voice mail via conventional telephone access and more recently via data connections and services which support IP has become more common. In the case of video systems however, e.g., cable systems, providing access to and control over voice mail has proven to be more difficult. This is, in part, due to the amount of legacy equipment deployed in cable systems. In such systems set top boxes are normally located in individual customer premises. The older set top boxes were generally designed to support video services and not necessarily interactive voice mail services or non-video data intensive services.
Like older set top boxes, many of the servers in cable headends were primarily designed to distribute video content. Such systems were, in many cases, not designed for the purpose of distributing voice mail messages or for supporting access to voice mail.
While cable network providers have often added voice mail servers to their systems to provide voice mail to users who subscribe to combined telephony, data and video packages, such voice mail servers have primarily been accessible to end users via telephone devices and not through set top boxes.
In order to increase the level of integration of services, it would be desirable if methods and apparatus could be developed which would allow a user access to the user's network based voice mail via a set top box. It would be particularly desirable if such methods could be developed without requiring major new elements in a cable network or replacement of existing set top boxes.